


And The Lights Burn Out

by ckret2



Series: TFSpeedwriting Prompts [7]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 15:57:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17164919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: "I could’ve been like you. Brains AND beauty. But I can’t have that. Any of it. And it’s my own fault.""It’s not your fault.""Then whose is it?"Glitch hates his powers, and the best Shockwave can do for him is try to help reframe how he looks at them.





	And The Lights Burn Out

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas, I'm crossposting all my fics from tumblr to ao3.
> 
> Prompt: from [@tfspeedwriting](tfspeedwriting.tumblr.com) 10/20, Prompt 3: [Your own worst enemy](https://tfspeedwriting.tumblr.com/post/179242588940/prompt-3-your-own-worst-enemy).

Glitch curled his head down to his knees, claws clutching his head, and screamed—in frustration, in grief, in sheer physical pain; and with his scream, the lights flickered but held steady, his recharge slab rebooted with a pop, and the door sliding shut behind Shockwave ground to a halt still one-third open.

Shockwave paused mid-step, glancing at the lights, then at the door over his shoulder, then filed away the discovery of this newest manifestation of Glitch’s abilities and hurried to his side. “Hey,” he said, quietly, soothingly. “Hey. It’s all right.” He sat next to Glitch on the floor, his thigh pressed against Glitch’s doubled-up legs, and leaned over to wrap an arm around his back, pulling him close. “You’re okay.”

“I’m n-not!” The words came out as a scream, but then Glitch fell nearly silent—except for the sobbing. Now he was sobbing.

Shockwave chanced a glance up to see if the lights were still flickering. No? Maybe it was a volume thing.

Back to Glitch, then. “You are. You’re fine.” Shockwave glanced at his arm—his new mod, the one that projected shimmering golden swirls an inch over his armor, was fritzing out. He held Glitch tighter, and his spark thrummed in time with Glitch’s staticky, synthesized sobbing. “You’re at home, you’re in the Academy, you’re surrounded by friends and fellow students and teachers who would never let anything happen to—”

“I destroyed a small hadron collider!”

Shockwave fell silent. (There was a sting on his lower back as the mod fully died. Oh, well—what was fashion next to a student’s needs?) “… Only shut it down temporarily,” Shockwave said. “We’ll have it working again within two weeks, once the parts come in.”

“So I  _temporarily_  destroyed it, that doesn’t change the fact that I— _rrrgh_!” He dug his claws into his head, deep enough to leave scrapes.

“Damus, please.” Shockwave put his free hand over one of Glitch’s, not pulling it off but trying to distract him from digging any deeper. “Don’t, you’re going to hurt yourself. A collider isn’t worth—”

“All I  _do_  is hurt myself!” He bent double again, pressing his helm into his knees. “I  _always_  hurt. I hurt whenever I make something else glitch out. My wrists and neck hurt all the time. I destroy my own things, I injure my friends, I damage Academy property…”

“Not on purpose,” Shockwave said gently. “You never want to hurt any of them—I know that.”

“Does it  _matter?!_ ” Glitch fought to sit up, and Shockwave let go of his back to allow him to rise. “I wish I  _did_  mean to do it,” he cried, looking up at Shockwave. His voice filled with all the emotions that the blank blue circle of his lone optic couldn’t hold. It hurt Shockwave’s spark to see him like this—not to see his face, not even to hear his pain, but to know that he had lost the ability to visibly express that pain. “I wish—I  _wish_  I could just  _control_  myself! No—I wish I didn’t  _have_  to control myself. I wish I could just  _be like everyone else,_  and  _not_  be ‘special,’ and not be terrified of  _touching things_ , or  _in agonizing pain all the time_ , or get  _arrested_  and  _mutilated for ACCIDENTALLY BREAKING THINGS—_ ”

With a series of crackles, the lights above burned out. “AND NOW I DO  _THIS_!” Glitch let out a scream of frustration and flopped down on his back.

Shockwave did what any good teacher would: he flopped down on the ground with Glitch. Softly, sympathetically, he said, “I’m sorry.”

For a moment, they didn’t say anything else. They lay there, quietly, together, staring up. Light from the partially closed door illuminated a strip of the ceiling.

“… I could’ve been like you,” Glitch said weakly. Shockwave turned his head to look at him, but Glitch was still staring up. “Brains  _and_  beauty. I’m well-read—even before you took me in. I’m smart. I was good looking—I could be keeping up with fashion too, if I still had the face for it. I’ve got a green spark. I could’ve been like you—going to all the most exclusive parties in Iacon, rubbing shoulders with the upper echelons of society, drinking fuel with double-digit vintages—”

“You’re severely overestimating how much of my time is spent at parties.”

“The parties are symbolic! The point is— The point is, I want to be…”

Shockwave waited with bated breath for Glitch to finish his sentence. Part of him was relieved when Glitch didn’t, because it meant he didn’t have to reply to it yet. It was a conversation they needed to have someday— _you don’t need to be like me, you don’t need to BE me; you’re your own whole independent different person and you should be proud of who you are, and what you are, and what you have and what you can do_ —but now wasn’t the time for it.

Finally, Glitch finished, “I just want to be normal.”

And they both politely pretended they didn’t know that wasn’t how he’d originally intended to finish the sentence.

“But…” Glitch shrugged weakly. “I can’t have that. Any of it. And it’s my own fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” Shockwave said.

“Then whose is it?” Glitch snapped. “Primus’s? My spark’s? Can I blame my spark separately from the rest of me? Was there a solar flare? Did a metallurgist drop me when I was a protoform?”

Shockwave chuckled. “That’s a novel theory on the genesis of outliers,” he said. “But no, I meant—you didn’t do anything wrong. I understand your anger—”

“I doubt it.”

“I understand  _that_  you’re angry. And I understand what it’s like to be furious over things you can’t change.” He’d spent most of his life furious over things he couldn’t change. “I can only imagine how much more infuriating—how much more  _painful_ —it is for the thing you can’t control to be yourself.”

Glitch made an exquisitely-synthesized grunt. Shockwave wondered where he’d picked up that noise.

“But,” he said, “I don’t think you need to blame yourself, because I don’t think there’s anything to blame. You look at your difference like it’s a curse, Damus. I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s an asset.”

“ _Hah!_ ”

“It could be useful.”

“Useful?! You want usef—  _Skids_  is useful. Top of every class, and nobody even knows he’s an outlier if he doesn’t tell them.”

“Skids can’t shut down anything on the planet.  _That_  is useful. That could  _save lives_. And it’s something only you can do.”

Glitch rolled his head to the side, slightly, just enough that Shockwave could see a sliver of his optic. “Save lives  _how?_  I’ve never been in a single situation that was ever made better by random objects breaking.”

“No?” Shockwave sat up slightly, brushing a knuckle against Glitch’s forearm, several inches above where his wrist had been severed. Glitch flinched, pulling his claw onto his lap. “I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t have benefitted from a few machines fortuitously malfunctioning at some point between your arrest and when  _this_  happened. And I can’t imagine other arrested bots wouldn’t be grateful if something were to interfere with  _their_  procedures.”

"Heh.” He lifted the claw Shockwave had brushed, holding it above his face, silhouetted against the strip of light on the ceiling. “Didn’t help me much.”

“No.” Shockwave pointed up at the broken lights, and then over at the door. “But then, at that time, you couldn’t shut things down by screaming.”

Glitch’s hand dropped back down to his chest. After a moment, he said, “No. I guess I couldn’t.”

“Someday,” Shockwave said, “you’re going to use your power to save people. To protect people. I’m sure of it.”

Glitch nodded once, slowly, contemplatively. And then said nothing more.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/179372242702/and-the-lights-burn-out).


End file.
